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This maniacally funny yet incredibly touching performer gives an amazing display of comic virtuosity in Buyer & Cellar, the comedy by Jonathan Tolins that opened Thursday night at the Panasonic Theatre as part of the off-Mirvish series.

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Hanke plays Alex More, an unemployed L.A. actor who’s trying to make ends meet after having been fired from Disneyland for disgracing his Roger Rabbit outfit by telling a snotty kid to shove a churro up his butt.

After that, all doors in the Magic Kingdom are closed to him (“no wonder they call it Mouseschwitz,” he mutters darkly) and he is obliged to take the strangest job ever.

You see, there was this crazy superstar lady named Barbra Streisand and she had built a mall under her mansion to house all her junk and she needed someone to take care of it all and play retail games with her whenever she wanted.

Enter our friend Alex and, even though his relative lack of Barbra knowledge makes it a case of square peg meeting round whole, he takes the job.

As Hanke charmingly tells us before the show proper begins, it’s all a work of fiction. Well, maybe not 100 per cent fictitious, because Streisand does have such an underground mall beneath her Malibu residence.

If nobody like Hanke ever did work there, it’s a real pity because he makes it sound like one of the most fascinating jobs possible. Of course, Hanke is such a born charmer he could make dental surgery performed without anesthesia seem delightful, but that’s why we’re lucky to spend 100 minutes with him.

When Tolins’ script is introducing us to this truly odd couple (Alex and Babs) meeting in her basement dollhouse and haggling over the price of toys she originally bought, it holds us totally and Hanke makes the most out of the encounters.

As he wisely tells us in advance, he doesn’t “do” Barbra. He reminds us that “a lot of people, including some women, already do that.”

But what Hanke provides is better than any mere impersonation. He brings something of the Elephant Man to his Streisand, capitalizing on the way she dips her shoulder down to protect herself in all her dealings with the world, or the way she flips her hair like a medieval banner to indicate whether or not she’s about to go into battle.

He makes faces that Jerry Lewis might have thought too bold, flings himself around physically in ways Marcel Marceau never dreamed of and uses every note in that wonderfully rangy voice that God gave him.

In short, Hanke is a performer to treasure and the show’s first 45 minutes are sheer unbridled joy, pure pants-splitting entertainment.

But author Tolins gets a bit too ambitious as the evening ticks on. We have to delve a bit too deeply into Alex’s relationship with his BF, Barry, and you can see the hoops the characters are going to leap through far in advance.

There’s also a sticky tableau in which it looks like Streisand and Alex might start an inappropriate employer-employee relationship, but Tolins and Hanke combine to defuse that one to hilarious effect just in the nick of time.

But I have to admit that the last third of the evening may leave you wondering how much is left rather than delighting in what you’ve just seen.

Granted, the opening night audience weren’t all Streisandistas and unless the whole crowd is swept up by a camp sensibility not unlike a gay gospel meeting the play won’t land the way it was meant to.

Nothing wrong with Mr. Hanke, however. He’s the kind of comic virtuoso who knows how to pull on your heartstrings and also understands how to flash a quick “meta” smile to make the whole thing plausible.

“I like you. You’re fun to be with,” says Streisand to Hanke/More at one point and she’s absolutely right, because people who need Hanke are the luckiest people in the world.

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